Testing the future distro is one of the most important task of the
community. Something that don't need extreme knowledge and need a very
large number of participants.
I think this aspect is largely underestimated on the wiki.
On the beginning, most members where "fans" and did now all about
testing :-). Now we have more and more "users" willing to help, but we
have to drive them.
Right now, one have to clic on the front page on "How to participate"
(good) to go to a nice looking page
(http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_Participate), but have to go to
"Develop it" to find:
"Test openSUSE and Report Bugs
You can help improve openSUSE by finding and reporting bugs. Our bug
tracking system, Bugzilla, is used for all openSUSE/SUSE Linux
products. If you have never written a bug report, please refer to Bug
Reporting FAQ to learn what kinds of information make the report most
useful."
I think the testing is *not* (not only) a developper task and should
be moved to the "Participate in it" section. To test, one have to
subscribe this present list (opensuse-testing), and report here before
thinking of bugzilla. Here we can teach the bugzilla working to
unexperienced users.
To send a newcommer to bugzilla is nearly lose it. I personnally had
to pass years before I could use bugzilla, and I'm not always cool
with it.
Notice that the text quoted don't even mention the
"http://en.opensuse.org/Testing" page!!
This very nice sentence:
"The openSUSE project includes a growing volunteer network of Linux
users and developers who participate in the ongoing creation and
improvement of openSUSE by testing development releases. This team of
testers has a common mission: they improve the world's most usable
Linux distribution by finding and constructively reporting relevant bugs."
is on the submit bug page, probably not the best place, because most
bigs should be subitted *before* the release, not after.
May be also we should have a way to less scare the user about the
usability of the beta releases. Many people (including me) fear to use
factory before RC1 not to lose data. Do you have a real example of
data loss because early use?? I have none real one. I have many
crashes reports, but no data loss.
I also advocate using VirtualBox in very early tests (may be also
Xen??), because any modern computer can build VirtualBox with 512Mo
ram and any distro should run inside - ands it's fearless
I can change the wiki pages, but I wont do so without discussion, so
what do you think??
thanks
jdd
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Hello
This list seems pretty empty, so may be it's usefull to use it?
I try to setup some infos for testing the future openSUSE 10.2
I think that the first simpler way to test a new distro is installing
in VirtualBox.
I choosed to use the non OSS, Sun VirtualBox version because most of
my devices are USB :-(
I found no way to install directly from factory, the mini CD fails
with "no repository". I was said isos are buggy...
so I installed the minimal openSUSE 11.1, changed the source to
factory/repo.oss and nonoss and zypper up did the job.
I could then use YaST to install kde4. I had minor problems doing so,
but finally could install as well the virtualbox extensions
Main problems where : no grafical interface (even with 512Mo ram given
to virtualbox) and some others I didn't remember
I think we should provide two things to testers:
* a minimal set of install system to test, beginning with the minicd,
then minimal dvd, to test the install itself (may be restructed to
images, even empty images on the beginning)
* compressed VirtualBox already installed images to test the
applications. Various images could be given are various times, more
complete when debugging goes well
This could ake the testing much more effective.
I wait for advice before going far more ahead
jdd
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